1000 miles or Our Hopefully Brief Dip into Antifrugality

The garage is on hold. And once again, a vehicle is to blame.

When our Subaru, our one and only vehicle, was wrecked last summer, we scurried to find a replacement. We didn't do as much research as we should have or we would have found out that the 2013 Equinox we bought was named in a class action suit against Chevy which was settled last fall. The problem? Excessive oil loss via the piston rings.

Supposedly, this is a piston ring gummed up with oil.

Guess whose car was just diagnosed with excessive oil loss?

This is not a cheap problem to fix so Mrs. Squeaky Wheel Rasely got on the phone with the dealer and after a few back and forths it was determined that an extended warranty will cover the fix. IF that is really the problem.

The real snag is proving it. For that, we had to have a dealer oil change and now we have to drive it 1000 miles in less than a month, then have it assessed.

Putting in that kind of mileage flies in the face of our skinflint lifestyle. We normally go out about 2 or 3 times a week (less during this pandemic) and make sure to group errands together. Now we are trying to find excuses to drive. Not easy when many places are still closed and in-person visits and activities are onerous.

We expect to hit all the Habitat ReStores within a hundred miles and any relatives in the state may be getting a visit, whether they want to see us or not. 

This does make the next few weeks a pain but at least the budget is freed up without the garage expense! 

Maybe I can, if I am very, very lucky, score that freezer at last.

TEFR: Out in the Cold

This is our new freezer.

COVID-19 and the ensuing shutdowns and shortages didn't catch us out like it did many people.

We have always tried to maintain back-up supplies of groceries and sundries (when folks were trading their firstborns for toilet paper, we had our usual 40 rolls on hand). We have shelves of home canned goods but were hoping to stock up on local produce and milk, We also planned on layer chickens this year but with the talk of possible meat shortages (and I won't even get into the duplicitousness of the meat packing industry in this regard), I picked up 6 Cornish Cross birds and planned on maybe more later.

We needed a freezer.

We found a place in the kitchen that would accommodate a small freezer and blithely set about pulling out the existing, cruddy cabinets.

That's when we discovered we were not alone in hoping to preserve summer's bounty. Nary a freezer, new or used, was to be found.

With a little rearranging, I did manage to squeeze the processed meat chickens into our fridge-top freezer and even a small amount of u-pick strawberries but soon cherries and blueberries will be ripe, to say nothing of tomatoes and herbs and beans and peas and etc. etc.

So, before we locked down the checking account completely, I bought this freezer-substitute.

As a certified tightwad, I have in the past dried food in the sun and in a closed car. Neither method worked particularly well. This inexpensive little dehydrator does a better job.

Here's some of what I've dried so far:

These will be repackaged in the right size jars with oxygen absorbers added.

Herbs, greens, celery, radishes, lavender, strawberries, apples.

Like many folks stuck at home, I too tried my hand at sourdough. My starter grew fine but the bread wasn't as good as our regular homemade loaf. I scored a pound of yeast that will last me about a year but didn't want to discard the starter.

Therefore, in the spirit of waste not, want not, and in case yeast once again becomes scarcer than hen's teeth, I dehydrated the sourdough starter. It should keep until the next pandemic (or phase 2 of this one!).

Dehydrated food can be used as is or rehydrated. It is a real space saver for those of us without cavernous pantries and the process is uncomplicated. 

I'm still hoping for a freezer but for now I'm glad our prep options didn't just dry up.

TEFR (Times of Extreme Frugality Redux): You've Made Your Bed, Now Garden in It!

When we tell people we garden in raised beds, they probably envision something like this:

Well, boy howdy, wouldn't that be nice? And pricey. A wooden 4' x 4' frame runs around $100, which makes raising your own food a pretty expensive hobby.

At this point, 5 out of our 8 beds are framed. All with lumber we had scrounged, a few screws and nails, and a lot of sweat.

Front yard beds

Today we just finished enclosing our strawberry bed.

We had 2' x 6's and some 2' x 4's free from a neighbor who was rehabbing an old house. This bed is in the front yard and on a slope so it took extra work to cobble together the sides; we did get it almost level, if you look at it a bit cross-eyed.

Yes, there are gaps, Yes, it is not as pretty as buying cedar or other fancy wood. We're more interested in what grows in the garden than the aesthetics. 

And to my mind, a bed of ripe strawberries or a trellis of green beans is a darn beautiful sight.

Someday we'll get around to framing the remaining beds (wooden sides make it a lot easier for Tom to mow around them). 

Backyard beds, only one is framed

Eventually, all of the various and sundry woods should weather to the same grey and our garden beds will match. 

But the berries and beans won't care.

Times of Extreme Frugality Redux

Narrator: When last we visited Times of Extreme Frugality, Tom and Cindy had recouped their finances to levels last seen prior to the Great Car Incident. Now they are ready to embark on another frugal adventure, this one intentional...


We find ourselves in great shape financially, for a change. Reduced spending due to the pandemic,  a job with the Census, and the stimulus checks means we are less poor than we have been in a while.

Can't let all of that money sit around. We decided to help the local economy, so...

We are getting a garage!

Ours won't be quite this big.

A garage should be a good investment for us. It will also, of course, eat up most of the money we just accumulated since last year. 

2020 (in addition to it's many other colorful attributes) will now be known in the Rasely household as:

"Times of Extreme Frugality Redux"

Stay tuned for more cheap fun, hacks, and, invariably, fails.

Times of Extreme Weirdness

Even for our place, things are getting strange.

I'm attempting sourdough starter and, since our place is fairly chilly, I've got it on a heat mat along with seed starts.

Stay home, stay safe, wash your hands.

Times of Normal Frugality: We Did It!

Last June our regular frugal lifestyle received a major hit: our one car was totaled. 

We avoid debt where possible so we paid cash for a replacement, but our bank account were reduced to uncomfortable levels. We vowed to get back to our normal pitiful savings asap.

Today, 8 months and 10 days later, we achieved that goal.

If you've followed this blog since last summer, you know some of the tricks we've used to squeeze the most out of our limited resources.

One important aspect I haven't mentioned is the help of others.

Americans are enamored with the rugged individual myth, the loner who takes on the world, the outsider who pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. But the real world doesn't work like that; no one makes their own boots, let alone handcrafts the bootstraps. We all are part of a community and need the give and take of other people (a hard truth for this hermit-inclined introvert to accept).

Help has come in big ways and small, both sought for and unexpected.

The loan of a car, free bags of kindling, the return of canning jars thought long gone, a neighbor plowing the driveway after a blizzard, the opportunity to earn a few dollars working the polls or substitute teaching, free wood from a remodel down the road, a gift of cash when least expected (thanks Mom!), being able to use free social media to sell a few unwanted items, the STAR program that reduced our taxes to a manageable level, and the NYSERDA loan program that saved us when the furnace died. 

Thanks to all. As the saying goes, it takes a village to be a tightwad.

We will now take one or two days off from extreme frugality, then pitch back in and get that loan paid off!

Times of Extreme Frugality: Waste Not, Don't Want

Those of us raised by frugal parents, have the phrase "Waste not, want not" ingrained in our dna. And we can't escape the guilt if we don't use a resource, even if it's not something we're thrilled with.

Like pumpkins.

I grew pumpkins this year. I love to grow pumpkins! One little seed produces rampant, leafy vines and the varieties are fascinating. What I don't like, is eating pumpkins. Nope, not even pumpkin pie. Not a problem when we had livestock. Chickens and goats and rabbits love pumpkin and it's a natural dewormer. But Silk Road is still lacking farm animals.

A partial solution this year was growing some Kakai Hulless plants. These produce no-shell seeds, great for snacking.

 But I also couldn't resist a few Jarrahdale, large and bluish pumpkins (or squash, whatever). They are so pretty and keep well. 

I still have at least 5 or 6 pumpkins hanging out in the house waiting for me to do something with them.

The first day of a new decade seems like a good time for action, so, I decided to cook up one of the blue gourds.

There is a lot of deep, golden flesh in one of these critters.

The woodstove is going constantly now, so I decided to use the cooktop to cook the flesh. This one pumpkin filled two pots. And when done and the rind cut away, filled seven tubs with puree.

We now have enough pumpkin to overload the freezer. This will last a long time. A long, long time.*

Thanks to the internet, I have recipes for pumpkin bread, pumpkin dinner rolls, pumpkin cookies, and the tonight's treat, pumpkin biscuits.

Drop biscuits

These should pair up well with the leftover chili currently warming on the woodstove. 

Homemade biscuits, one less pumpkin in the closet, no guilt from my thrifty conscience. All in all, a good start to the year.

*Someone remind me of this when planting time comes and encourage me to cut back on the pumpkin patch.